limestone hills, under the wide blue sky--this poor squalid little
village where I couldn't get a cup of tea!

It was the child surviving in her which had attracted and puzzled me;
it does not often shine through the dulling veil of years so brightly.
And as she now appeared to me as a child in heart I could picture her
as a child in years, in her little cotton frock and thin bare legs, a
sunburnt little girl of eight, with the wide-eyed, eager, half-shy,
half-trustful look, asking you, as the child ever asks, what you
think?--what you feel? It was a wonderful world, and the world was the
village, its streets of gritstone houses, the people living in them,
the comedies and tragedies of their lives and deaths, and burials in
the churchyard with grass and flowers to grow over them by-and-by. And
the church;--I think its interior must have seemed vaster, more
beautiful and sublime to her wondering little soul than the greatest
cathedral can be to us. I think that our admiration for the loveliest
blooms--the orchids and roses and chrysanthemums at our great annual
shows--is a poor languid feeling compared to what she experienced at
the sight of any common flower of the field. Best of all perhaps were
the elms at the village end, those mighty rough-barked trees that had
their tops "so close against the sky." And I think that when a
blackbird chanced to sing in the upper branches it was as if some
angelic being had dropped down out of the sky into that green
translucent cloud of leaves, and seeing the child's eager face looking
up had sung a little song of his own celestial country to please her.




XIV